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04 January 2017

Open Europe: UK Ambassador to EU unexpectedly resigns and warns of short supply of negotiating experience in Whitehall


Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK ambassador to the EU, unexpectedly resigned and warned of ‘muddled thinking’.

In his resignation email Rogers said, “We do not yet know what the government will set as negotiating objectives for the UK’s relationship with the EU after exit…Serious multilateral negotiating experience is in short supply in Whitehall, and that is not the case in the Commission or in the Council.” He urged his staff to “continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking.” A UK government spokesman said, “Sir Ivan has taken this decision now to enable a successor to be appointed before the UK invokes Article 50 by the end of March.”

Full letter on BBC News

[...] Sir Ivan, a former Treasury and EU official, knows everything there is to know about how Brussels works. He was David Cameron’s chief adviser on Europe. He got to know Theresa May when, as home secretary, she engaged in tortuous talks over Britain’s opt-out from EU policies on justice and home affairs. But he has long been faulted by Eurosceptics as too gloomy over Brexit. In December he was pilloried for reporting that it could take ten years to negotiate and ratify a trade deal with the EU. Yet as Sir Ivan put it this week, free trade “does not just happen when it is not thwarted by authorities.” Experience shows that such deals can indeed take years to agree.

His other purported sin came during Mr Cameron’s attempted renegotiation of Britain’s membership terms before the referendum. At one point the prime minister wanted to demand a unilateral emergency brake on free movement of EU citizens to Britain. Sir Ivan advised him that other EU leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, would reject this out of hand. So Mr Cameron settled instead for a four-year freeze on in-work benefits for EU migrants. Brexiteers claim that, without Sir Ivan’s excessive caution, Britain could have got a lot more. Yet the EU’s attachment to free movement is genuine and deep—even the benefits change that Mr Cameron won took 48 hours of hard pounding to secure. [...]

The Economist: Britain’s man in Brussels resigns less than three months before Brexit negotiations begin

Open Europe’s Senior Policy Analyst Vincenzo Scarpetta argues in an article for the CapX website, “The timing of the decision is far from ideal. If the Government sticks to its original timeline for invoking Article 50, the Brexit talks will kick off at some point in the spring – once the other 27 EU member states agree on their own negotiating guidelines. This leaves limited time for finding a replacement and for the handover…Nonetheless, we also need to put things into context…The reality is that Sir Ivan was never going to be the UK’s lead negotiator in the Brexit talks. This role will be reserved for the so-called ‘sherpas’ of heads of state and government.” He concludes, “While Sir Ivan’s experience and knowledge would certainly have come in handy over the next few months, we should not exaggerate the possible consequences of his resignation for the Government’s negotiating strategy – let alone for the UK’s chances of securing a good deal.”

Analysis on Open Europe



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